Fishman: Getting to the root of the matter

Jane Fishman

Sunday

Nov 27, 2011 at 12:03 AM

Move over, squash. Get out of town, tomatoes. Eggplant? Take a hike. It is time for you to shelve your flashy, fragile, show-offish, braggadocio selves. It’s time to find a cushy spot and rest up for another splashy performance next summer. Now — drum roll, please — it is time for your unsung, unseen, unheralded brothers and sisters, your second-and third-cousins once removed (the ones you hardly ever see or get in touch with except maybe over Thanksgiving) to have a turn at the dinner table.

It is time to get back to our roots: gnarled, earthy, distorted, weather-beaten roots.

Quieter in nature than summer vegetables, more subdued in color and less rambunctious in personality, roots are thoughtful. Their actions speak louder than their words. They don’t need the limelight or the lipstick. They are comfortable with themselves. Yes, they’re harder to warm up to and not exactly good-looking, but really, if you were on the lam, migrating from shtetl to shtetl, from enemy to enemy, what would you rather be carrying with you in your backpack, a fragile tomato that will rot in days or a hardy rutabaga? An easily damaged yellow squash prone to all kinds of diseases or a rough-and-tumble parsnip? A squishy and easily bruised zucchini or a muscular turnip?

Maybe you don’t know that the secret to a good chicken soup — or the Jewish cure for a cold, as a friend of mine calls it — is a parsnip, a sweet, buttery root vegetable, a kissing cousin to the carrot, which it strongly resembles, only sweeter, especially when cooked. These days I am sautéing onions, turnip greens and, the piece de resistance, the parsnip. Try it. I guarantee you: people will be saying, What is this sweet taste?

Then there is the rutabaga, a cross between a cabbage and a turnip. It’s a beautiful name, I think, all those vowels, that long “u” and long “a” and short “a.” I don’t really know why it comes waxed. I cut that part off. Then I cut it in chunks — it’s tough! Beware — and roast it as I would potatoes, carrots, onions, sweet potatoes and parsnips.

Not to be left out is another tuber or root vegetable, the oddly named Jerusalem artichoke, which has nothing to do with Jerusalem or the artichoke. But it, like the artichoke, is a member of the helianthus — or daisy — family. I like to grow it because it is a perennial and it produces a tall plant with a yellow daisylike bloom that appears in October when there is not that much color in the garden. When you wash them you’ll think their shapes resembles an armadillo.

But this year I dug up a mess of tubers and gave them to a friend to cook.

She, more inventive than I, cleaned, diced and sautéed them in butter and then added strips of kumquat zest (from my kumquat tree), crumbled sorrel petals (also from my garden) and a tablespoon or two of orange blossom honey. Yum. Then she tried another homemade recipe.

She cleaned and chopped the chokes, threw them in a cast iron skillet with some onion, rosemary and kumquat wedges, which she roasted at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.

Another yummy dish, sweet, nutty and not just a pretty face. But they’re powerful, these Jerusalem artichokes, if you get my drift (or wind). A little goes a long way.

Finally, there is my all-time favorite root: the beet, the vegetable everyone loves to hate. If I had a dime for everyone who said they hated beets I would be a very, very wealthy woman. Why, I ask you, are beets so odious to so many people? Except that’s a trick question because I already know the answer.

It’s because of canned beets, that disgusting facsimile of the real thing, that gelatinous mass of ickiness that has graced so many buffet tables, sitting there, ignored and bleeding onto other nearby food groups. Well, forget the can of beets and meet the real deal. You won’t be sorry.

The other day I was helping prepare an early Thanksgiving dinner at the May Street YMCA’s Bring it Home program through the Forsyth Farmer’s Market. It’s one thing to organize farmers to sell their product but it’s another to teach people how to cook these things that come out of the earth, things like root vegetables, like beets. But getting people to try beets was a hard sell — until I mentioned that in general the healthiest food you can eat is food that has the darkest, richest color. Like beets.

“Look at that red,” I said, pointing to a cooked and softened beet. “Look closely at those concentric rings.”

Just hearing the “b” word, people wrinkled their noses and made nasty, growling, tortuous sounds. But I persisted. Bravely, two people — two naysayers — tried a bite. And — I’m here to report — they lived to say they liked it and may consider eating more.